We Discovered My Husband Is Bisexual When He Was 62
Chronicle of an Open Marriage #44
I knew a woman when I was younger whose husband had left her when he realized he was homosexual. I thought it was a horrible fate. What did it say about her? I wondered. Was she such an unappealing woman that she turned her husband gay?
What an idiot I was.
I’m much older now, and a little less stupid. And now I know that nobody “turns” another person gay or straight. Those desires already live within us.
What I think now is that most people would be pansexual if society didn’t grind us down so hard, forcing us to squish ourselves into identical gender boxes. A sexy person is a sexy person, regardless of gender. And the more rabidly anti-gay a person is, the more likely that they are attracted to gay people. Passion is passion, after all, whether positive or negative. If you weren’t secretly attracted to gay men or trans women, you wouldn’t have to kill them. Or beat them up. Or put them in prison. Or outlaw their activities. You could simply live and let live. You wouldn’t have anything to (dis)prove.
Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey provides a good example of how society imposes conformity and obscures our true natures. He was a lecturer at Indiana University and a respected entomologist when he was asked to teach a class about Marriage and Family. Then he realized there was zero scientific research on human sexuality. His students had questions, and he wanted to give them answers. But unlike church and the government, he refused to make them up.
Forgive me for quoting myself here. It’s easier, since I already wrote a story about Kinsey.
He began his project in the 1930s, when masturbation was said to cause blindness and considered a sin, homosexuality was classed as a criminal perversion, and women were said to like little or no sex at all, with any pleasure coming strictly from penis to vagina intercourse within a marriage. Then he and his team collected more than 12,000 extremely detailed sexual histories from across the United States.
What he found was far different than church and social dictates supposed.
Among his findings were that 37 percent of men have had some kind of homosexual experience in their lifetime, and only 30 percent of humans are strictly hetero- or homosexual. The rest of us fall somewhere in between.
Kinsey’s findings have been updated since way back then, in part by making room for asexuality, but his overall conclusions hold true. Human beings are a lot more sexually fluid than we’re led to believe.
Take my husband, for example. When I met him in college, I was 25 and he was a 21-year-old virgin. I didn’t know that at first. He lied about his age and his sexual status didn’t come up until after we had intercourse for the first time. He came instantly. When I complained, that was his explanation.
I wondered about why he was a virgin, of course, and he told me that he was an extremely shy person. Intimacy was hard for him. He didn’t want to have sex with just any woman, because he knew once he did, he would want to marry her, and he hadn’t met anyone whom he wanted to marry — until me. That was sweet, and very flattering. And after four years of dating proved he was a good man with most of the qualities I desired in a partner, we got married and stayed that way. We’re coming up on 40 years...
But we haven’t exactly been happily married. We’ve bickered, a lot. And one of the things we bickered about often was sex. Hubs wanted sex all the time. I didn’t. I figured it was because he had a higher sex drive. I found out later that wasn’t true. He just needed to do things differently to ignite me. But like many people, he wasn’t focused on getting my needs met. He was focused on his own. Over the years, he suggested doing some things in the bedroom that I wasn’t into. And sometimes, I wondered if he was gay.
All this came to a head about a year and a half ago, when we were on the brink of divorce. That’s when I asked him to seek sex outside the marriage — more specifically, to seek sex with men. I wanted to do something radical to break our disturbing cycle. And I wanted to find out once and for all if my husband was gay.
Thinking about it now, I am once again amazed by my own stupidity. And I was 66 at the time! You’re never too old to be a dumbass, I guess. Just like the church and government, I was trying to squish my husband into a restrictive gender box. My thinking was that either he would like having sex with men, or he wouldn’t. Either he was gay, or he wasn’t. I guess I imagined that our 40+ years of having frequent sexual relations didn’t count.
But they did count, of course. They do. And as it turns out, my husband does like having sex with men. He also likes having sex with me, a woman. He likes it all.
We’ve learned a lot in the last year and a half, and breaking out of that box has much improved our marriage. We bicker less. We’re more satisfied in the bedroom. And we’re able to give and receive love more freely. I’m not sure why. Could it be because we’re doing less squishing and contorting? Less pretending that we like living in a box?
We’re not following the “normal” script for marriage any longer. We’re improvising. And I can’t help but think about the magnificent variation in nature, and how changing and adapting is what has allowed some species to thrive.
When I consider the condition of the world today, I think it’s time for our species to make some big changes, too. And I wonder if breaking out of our gender boxes could play a part.
Imagine if no one had to prove they were a “real man” or a “good woman,” but could focus on being a “good person” instead. Imagine if we made fewer black and white distinctions that require picking one side over another, like whether we are straight or gay. Would our world become kinder and gentler? Would we be less violent and more considerate of other people who differ from ourselves?
It’s a thought.
What happened next? Read Chronicle of an Open Marriage #45. Find all my stories about opening our marriage on the list below, or about sex in general on this one. Get an email whenever I publish. And have an enlightening day.
